“I was running a software company and discovered how difficult it was to hire developers,” he said. “I was thinking about an idea and that more people should learn to code, and it could address the diversity in tech and reaching out to more (potential developers).”

After moving to Portland in May 2013, Kaiser-Nyman set up Epicodus in a small office in downtown Portland. It’s a school that takes people with little to no programming experience and teaches them how to code in an intensive, hands-on four month program.

The first 12 weeks are dedicated to learning fundamentals and the last four weeks are spent in an internship with a local tech company or working on development projects at the school for local nonprofits. For the current class students will be interning with companies such as Sprig Health, Sprint.ly, Pollinate Media, Crowd Compass and Uncorked Studios.

At the end of the course, Kaiser-Nyman works with students to help them with find jobs by making introductions.

His first class of 24 students, which started last summer and ended in November, had 100 percent job placement, he said. The current class has 60 students and is five weeks into the program.

Applications for the next cycle are expected to be on the company’s website next week.

Students apply for the school and are expected to do a little work ahead of acceptance to determine if learning to code really is something they would like, Kaiser-Nyman said. Using an online curriculum, potential students learn enough to solve what's known in the coding education world as the "FizzBuzz problem."

Here's how it works: The potential students write a program that brings up a webpage showing the numbers between 1 and 100. For every number divisible by three, the program write “fizz.” For every number divisible by five, the program writes “buzz.” The numbers divisible by both three and five are tagged “fizzbuzz.”

Once students are accepted into the program, they work on new problems every week. They code for about eight hours a day on school-supplied computers, Kaiser-Nyman said. Each week, new concepts are introduced that build upon the previous week's teachings.

Tuition for the school is $3,400. Students can choose to pay up front or there is a payment plan option, Kaiser-Nyman said.

So far, the school has three full-time instructors, including Kaiser-Nyman, and the business is profitable. He has so far self-funded the venture.

Students do not walk out with a recognized certificate or a degree, but, Kaiser-Nyman doesn’t see that as a problem since they can walk away with jobs.

“One of the beauties of the tech industry — and it’s not perfect, but it’s better than others — is companies just want to see if you can code and that you work well with a team,” he said. “Companies just want you to be productive.”

“We hired three of their graduates as full time junior developers,” said Cory Zimmerman, director of system architecture for Sandbox Studio. “They are great additions to the team. None of them had backgrounds in programming and we had been struggling to find programmers with the foundation we needed and were available to work.”

The new hires are helping to build in-house applications for the studio using the programming language Ruby on Rails.

Zimmerman said even though the students didn’t have a traditional degree they had the real-world experience that mattered. The company had been looking for programmers for about six months before hiring out of Epicodus.

“The reality is there is a huge demand in Portland for Ruby developers,” he said. “When there are people and when they are available, they get snatched up really quick.”